I have often wondered how our parents made as good a living as they did for themselves and seven children on thirteen acres of ground, but we always had enough to eat and as our mother was a good sewer and knitter we looked as good as our companions. As President Eisenhower said, "We were poor, but we didn't know it." Now everyone is underprivileged if they don't have a bathroom and electricity, but it was 1902 before we even got a pitcher pump in the kitchen. This we regarded as quite a luxury. The telephone line was built about the same time and then we had the entertainment of the "party line." Our family was a great family to read and read all the books we could get hold of in the community. I can remember Clara reading to Helen and me in the kitchen near the old coal stove on winter nights by an oil lamp. Our favorite was the Leather Stocking Tales, by J. Fenimore Cooper. We say with mouths open at the Indian tales. My father when I was rather young thought I should get more interested in reading, so he brought home Alice in Wonderland as a start, and when that was finished he got the history of the French Revolution. Quite a change of diet! But they were ambitious for us to broaden our horizon as much as possible and gave us all some education in the academies of that day. (Oscar attended Elderton Academy.) Soon after the "turn of the century" my father was again the victim of the changing times. After the big packing houses were established in Chicago and better methods of transportation developed, the huckstering business ceased to be profitable, so he quit that and bought another threshing outfit, consisting of a steam traction engine, a separator, clover huller, hay baler, and a water tank. This required a crew of four, an engineer, two to feed the grain into the separator, and a water boy. This was some life, hard and dusty work. He would start out after wheat harvest in July and finish up with hay baling in December. I would go along in the fall until school teaching time, to fatten up for the winter. I can see those tables after sixty years. One woman would try to outdo the other. Sometimes there would be two or three kinds of meat. Often there were thirteen or fourteen at the table. They would often try to feed us pie for breakfast. We were usually gone from Monday morning until Saturday evening. Some of the homes were log, and hot in the fall. We often took blankets and slept in the haymow. During these years father was also secretary of a local mutual fire insurance company, then tax collector. I remember one day Amos King came along and asked for his taxes to be added up as he was going to the next farm and would be back past. I prepared his receipts and soon he came back and paid them. In a few minutes there was a rap at the door and there was Amos. He exclaimed in bewilderment, "I understand this school and county and road taxes, but this last amount is for "total taxes" and I don't have any total. I explained to him that the total was the sum of his taxes and he left happy. Once a year the directors of the insurance company met to elect officers. That meant a turkey dinner for the twelve and some of their wives, for the grand sum of five dollars. We would come home from school to view a well-picked carcass of a turkey with no meat remaining. What a disgusting sight for school children!